Tuesday, 19 July 2016

How To Build a Free Website That Makes Money Without Any Coding

I’d
been hearing snippets of talk about a company that offered a way to
make a website without programming. Then I heard that they make it dead
easy to add all sorts of money making content on your site, without you
having to go sign up for affiliate programs. Then I heard that you can
get this for free. Even better, you can attach your own domain name to
the site and effectively get free hosting. Seriously.DevHub is the
site I’m talking about. So I went to check it out and make my own
revenue generating site. I was very skeptical that any sort of website
making application could turn out anything that looked and ran decent at
all. For years I worked with various content management systems like
Red Dot, Joomla, WordPress and Spectra. All of them required some degree of programming to make a decent web site.
Here’s how you can make your website.
First, go to DevHub and begin the sign up process. It’s a very easy
thing to do. Just look on the homepage for the very obvious button.

From there, it asks you for some typical sign-up information: first
name, last name, e-mail address. Nothing too intrusive. Again, very
easy. At this point you can choose your own sub-domain or let DevHub
know that you are going to use your own domain. I went the subdomain
route, because although I love my dear readers, I’m not buying a domain name just for a demonstration.

As you can see, the site has a very distinct Web 2.0 feel. Typically I
don’t care for that sort of design, but it works extremely well, when
the application functions simply and smoothly.
This is where the money making begins. On this page, you can choose
what kind of revenue generating modules you’d like to include in your
website. I decided to use all of them, for testing purposes.

So there you go, some of it is affiliate revenue, and some of it is
pay-per-click (PPC) type advertising. I’m guessing that DevHub sets up
these relationships and then takes a slice of whatever your page makes
and passes the rest on to you. Sounds like a decent business model to
me. I just wish I had thought of, and executed, the idea as well as
DevHub did.
Next, you pick out the physical layout of the site. One column with
header, two columns with header and so on. each layout has it’s own
strengths and weakness, so try to think about how you want your content
laid out before doing this step. There’s no need to overthink it though,
because you’ll see that changing the layout is also brilliantly easy.

Then you can choose your colour scheme. DevHub has really simplified
the process by making most of their colour schemes simple and limited.
By doing so, the site will always look good and take the burden of
designing off of you.

Now that that’s done, you’ll be asked to read and agree to the end
user license. It seemed pretty straightforward to me, even though it’s a
bunch of legalese. You should read it for yourself and if you have any
questions, talk to a legal professional. I am not a lawyer, nor do I
play one on the web.
On to the final editing of your cash cow site. DevHub presents you with a mock-up of how the page will look, but with some AJAX elements to help you tweak it more.
You can change the number of columns. There are only three choices,
but really anything more than three columns is just cluttered looking
and will lose you readers.

You can drag and drop elements on the page to reposition them. The
green shows you where the element will land if you drop it right now.

You can tweak what the module will show. In the Search Keyword
field you can add more than one word. I just went with one, for
efficiency. In the City or State field, I don’t know if non-North
American cities or states show up. Give it a shot, I’m pretty sure they
would. This helps you REALLY target your advertising to your specific
audience, increasing your chances to make a few bucks.

You can add MORE modules or widgets. Be careful with this! Some
people think that if they pepper their site with enough ads, they’ll get
clicked more often. Not so. What will happen is your site will die,
penniless and alone.

And, finally, the part that really matters, you can add or edit
content without knowing a thing about HTML or any programming language.
The Content Module has most of the editing features you might find in a word processing program.

Once you’ve got all that set up, you can preview your site to see just what it would look like. Not tooo shabby, eh?

Of course, it would look better if there were some real content in
there. However, I think this illustrates pretty well the ability of
DevHub to help you build a website that is monetized, looks decent and
is free! That’s the trifecta right there, folks.
Naturally, this all begs the question. How much can you make with a
DevHub website? Well, I don’t really know. That’s pretty much up to your
ability to market the site and drive visitors to it. Then, hopefully,
they like what they see and click on a few links and maybe buy some
affiliate products. Yes, you could probably make more if you set up your
own affiliate and PPC relationships on your own website, but how many
of us can make a decent website on our own?
Let’s say you only make about a hundred bucks a month from your site.
That’s fairly high for a new site, but it can be done. It’s not that
much is it? However DevHub allows you to set up 10 different sites for
free. So, if you can get each site to generate about a hundred bucks,
that makes for a thousand dollars a month! Not enough to quit your day
job or retire, but maybe it helps pay off the house a little quicker or
helps you save up for a down payment.
Keep in mind the entire process from start to finish took me less
than ten minutes. Instant web presence and not a dime out of pocket.
There you have it folks! Don’t thank me, thank DevHub.
Do you have any experience using DevHub? Are there other apps out
there like this (or better) that give you free website and lets you
monetize it? How’s your monetizing process been going? Drop us a line
below.